Over 90 percent of the young people in the survey used contraception the first time they had sex. | Image: shutterstock/chingyunsong

Young people in Switzerland are roughly 16 years old when they have their first sexual contact. They have intercourse for the first time at about 17, and many of them find it neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And while most of them use condoms, ten percent of young people today have already had a sexually transmitted disease – the most frequent being chlamydia. These are the findings of the online survey ‘Sexual health and behavior of young people in Switzerland’, carried out by the university hospitals of Zurich and Lausanne. The participants were 7,142 Swiss adults aged between 24 and 26 years.

Would you have revealed so much about yourself? Well, the participants were hesitant too, judging from their response rate. The researchers assume it was the intimate nature of the topic that held people back. “Getting a high response rate is a problem for researchers in general”, says Christina Akré of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Lausanne.

The information gained from this survey is now being evaluated in greater detail, and their article ‘How did the first time go?’ will be published soon. The researchers discuss why young people might feel that their first sexual experience came at the wrong time.

But is it even necessary to investigate such intimate details? Christina Akré explains why: “This is the first-ever study on the sexual health of Swiss young people since 1995. Since there, a lot of changes have taken place that potentially have an impact on relationships between young adults”. These changes include the development of the Internet.

It’s important to ask about people’s initial sexual experiences, says Akré. Because the when and the where of it can have an impact on their health. Just what that impact really is, still has to be properly investigated.